Sometimes, you disappear.

For while now, I have been in hiding. It has been a long while since my last post here on Medium. Since I began my first semester in college in September, I decided that my personal writing was to become a lower priority. I’ve had a near month off, returning on the 9th of January, and decided I’d write something up before the new year began.

It feels hypocritical of me to stop, after being such an advocate for writing every day. I have been working diligently — sure, but by pouring my energy solely into academia, I’ve found a lack of balance. I need to create a new system, one that includes creative writing in my daily routine.

And so, with things becoming so quiet, I decided I needed to return — to write out my thoughts once again. Things need to be re-examined.

Bubbles of Thoughts

Looking back on the year, and my entries, I realize I need to take a deeper look into the focus of my writing. What do I actually want to say? What’s my mission?

The truth is, I initially began to prove to myself that I could create a blog. And I did do that. I wrote out the bubbles of thoughts that had been inside my head for quite awhile, and I sort of just stopped when I had run out of those.

In doing so, I’ve built myself a platform. It’s not a popular one, but that’s fine. It’s a place where I can write things I think are important, and where people can read those things, if they want. And this was a liberty that was important for me to advocate — that everyone should have their own personal space within the web to express their thoughts, no matter how mundane.

Focus

So I have to figure out what I want to focus on. The multitude of nebulous topics I have found myself writing about are too often repeated. I think that it is important to realize that hard work and vulnerability to write about specific, quantifiable things.

It takes original research, dedication and passion. These aren’t things you can effortlessly create or automate from other sources.

In the coming weeks, I’ll begin to flesh out a more detailed and unambiguous mission plan for this blog and it’s entries. I already have ideas, maybe I’ll even create separate projects in the coming year.

Words

It’s difficult to attempt to talk about the year as a whole. More than anything, it has been been the year of outliers. It was the year I decided to blog.

From March to June, which is when I did the bulk of my blogging, I wrote 30,000 words in more than two dozen stories. And I believe anybody can accomplish that kind of quantity if they tried.

Here’s to even more words in 2017!